The History of Microsoft - 1975

Description

Thirty-four years ago, a nineteen year old kid and his twenty-two year old business partner sold their first program to a little computer company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The program was called BASIC, and it was the start of this company we call
Microsoft.

Today, we’re beginning a brand new series called The History of Microsoft. Travel with us back in time as we discover the roots of one of the world's most important technology companies. Using rare video
and photos we bring you the heart of Microsoft's struggles and successes. Year by Year. Every Thursday we will air a brand new episode beginning with 1975 where "The History of Microsoft" all began.

"My favorite part of the interview is when Bill's bragging about how he reduced the number of bytes for the loader that Paul had built" lol..yeah that bit with Bill bringing that up made my chuckle too

Thanks for supporting this show everyone. There is lots of great footage like we see in 1975 in the years to come. It's really pretty amazing when you sit back and listen to Billg talk about how it all came together. It's good to be a part of the channel
9 community. Is there an initiation or anything? Nevermind. That scares me.

Really awesome.
Can't wait to see the rest.
If you haven't already seen it, watch "Triumph of the nerds" and "Nerds 2.0.1" from Robert X Cringely. They are great documentaries about the birth of modern computing and the Internet.

man that's awesome, I like when Bill mention that the first bootstraper was 46 bytes and then later he wrote one on 17 bytes.
Can you imagine sitting in your office facinated with this computer and flipping switches all day long? we have come a very LONG way, I am sure people would be making fun of us in 100 year from now for having desktops with only 2 and 4 cores.

Wow it's really great to see that this all started the year i was born.
Going from holes punched into cardboard to enter instructions into the computer, all the way up to Microsoft Windows 7 technology.
Congrats Microsoft.

Awesome, thank you Tina to share this. The most amazing thing I like that Bill & Paul invent Basic in one month or less! I liked that bill is still having that Altair 8800 also I like when Bill enhanced the loader and reduce the number of bytes for the
loader lol.

I love this show, really nice to know the history of MS. But I want to download these vids, streaming is quite poor on my connection it takes ages, also anyone know what the title music is...quite nice!

Sorry to be grumpy, but I'd much prefer a version targeted at programmers, without the instant-brainwipe background noise and with a presenter who looks and sounds like she'd code circles around me. Just a thought.

I think I bought my 8K Microsoft Basic rom for th Rockwell Aim 65 in 1978. To me (in Europe) Microsoft already was an institute, an authority. But Basic was Texas Instruments calculators and school (arrays and mathematics), Forth was HP reversed polish
notation, electronics and fun. I studied for weeks, but - just as with the 8K Monitor rom of the Aim 65 - I couldn't make the connection between the assembly opcode and what was going on functionally. It just went over my head. The 4 K Forth rom was easy:
if you understood defining words (especially the Next-interpreter) you understood it all. Besides, most of Forth was written in Forth.

I think what killed Forth was that it was Open Source (the term then, slipped my mind). I wonder what would have happened if Bill had gone for Forth in those days. I think, we would have had totally different boundaries regarding opcode, operating systems,
languages, applications etc, than we do today. A lot of what the CLR, managed code, .Net Framework and the like is meaning to us, would have been intrinsic in my view. Anyway, Microsoft today is an ashtonishing feat, with a lot more to come probably.

It is very interesting to see the beginning of this now Empire of a company. I remember when I was a kid about 10 years old or so and got my first PC for Christmas. That system is ancient now but I still have pictures of it. It is truly interesting how far
technology has come since the mid/early 80's.

Wow it's really great to see that this all started the year i was born. Going from holes punched into cardboard to enter instructions into the computer, all the way up to Microsoft Windows 7 technology. Congrats Microsoft.

[quote]Feb 05, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Dan wroteThis footage is awesome, It's so cool seeing the first version of BASIC My favorite part of the interview is when Bill's bragging about how he reduced the number of bytes for the loader that Paul had built [/quote]You have to understand that in the early days of micro computers every byte counted. The was limited memory and limited space for storage.